Search results for ""stanford university press""

The spread of market-oriented reforms has been one of the major political and economic trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Governments have, to varying degrees, adopted policies that have led to deregulation: the liberalization of trade; the privatization of state entities; and low-rate, broad-base taxes. Yet some countries embraced these policies more than others. Johan Christensen examines one major contributor to this disparity: the entrenchment of U.S.-trained, neoclassical economists in political institutions the world over. While previous studies have highlighted the role of political parties and production regimes, Christensen uses comparative case studies of New Zealand, Ireland, Norway, and Denmark to show how the influence of economists affected the extent to which each nation adopted market-oriented tax policies. He finds that, in countries where economic experts held powerful positions, neoclassical economics broke through with greater force. Drawing on revealing interviews with 80 policy elites, he examines the specific ways in which economists shaped reforms, relying on an activist approach to policymaking and the perceived utility of their science to drive change.

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The field of text technologies is a capacious analytical framework that focuses on all textual records throughout human history, from the earliest periods of traceable communication—perhaps as early as 60,000 BCE—to the present day. At its core, it examines the material history of communication: what constitutes a text, the purposes for which it is intended, how it functions, and the social ends that it serves. This coursebook can be used to support any pedagogical or research activities in text technologies, the history of the book, the history of information, and textually based work in the digital humanities. Through careful explanations of the field, examinations of terminology and themes, and illustrated case studies of diverse texts—from the Cyrus cylinder to the Eagles' "Hotel California"—Elaine Treharne and Claude Willan offer a clear yet nuanced overview of how humans convey meaning. Text Technologies will enable students and teachers to generate multiple lines of inquiry into how communication—its production, form and materiality, and reception—is crucial to any interpretation of culture, history, and society.

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In the natural course of events, humans fall sick and die. The history of medicine bristles with attempts to find new and miraculous remedies, to work with and against nature to restore humans to health and well-being. In this book, Londa Schiebinger examines medicine and human experimentation in the Atlantic World, exploring the circulation of people, disease, plants, and knowledge between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. She traces the development of a colonial medical complex from the 1760s, when a robust experimental culture emerged in the British and French West Indies, to the early 1800s, when debates raged about banning the slave trade and, eventually, slavery itself. Massive mortality among enslaved Africans and European planters, soldiers, and sailors fueled the search for new healing techniques. Amerindian, African, and European knowledges competed to cure diseases emerging from the collision of peoples on newly established, often poorly supplied, plantations. But not all knowledge was equal. Highlighting the violence and fear endemic to colonial struggles, Schiebinger explores aspects of African medicine that were not put to the test, such as Obeah and vodou. This book analyzes how and why specific knowledges were blocked, discredited, or held secret.

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How has the modern conservative movement thrived in spite of the lack of harmony among its constituent members? What, and who, holds together its large corporate interests, small-government libertarians, social and racial traditionalists, and evangelical Christians? Raised Right pursues these questions through a cultural study of three iconic conservative figures: National Review editor William F. Buckley, Jr., President Ronald Reagan, and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Examining their papers, writings, and rhetoric, Jeffrey R. Dudas identifies what he terms a "paternal rights discourse"—the arguments about fatherhood and rights that permeate their personal lives and political visions. For each, paternal discipline was crucial to producing autonomous citizens worthy and capable of self-governance. This paternalist logic is the cohesive agent for an entire conservative movement, uniting its celebration of "founding fathers," past and present, constitutional and biological. Yet this discourse produces a paradox: When do authoritative fathers transfer their rights to these well-raised citizens? This duality propels conservative politics forward with unruly results. The mythology of these American fathers gives conservatives something, and someone, to believe in—and therein lies its timeless appeal.

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"Sometimes I sit down on a big flat rock, which abuts a garden pool, and listen to the drip-drip of the water as it falls with quiet measured cadence into the pool. I think of the great back-to-nature movement, which has, under the name of Taoism, for so many centuries fascinated and motivated the classic Chinese lifestyle. And I think that 'fishing' in nature for serenity is no monopoly of the Chinese, nor indeed of any century, and that it is my prerogative, as well, to be a 'fisherman.'" So says Mary Mayer Tanenbaum in one of the many outstanding articles she wrote on the relationship among Chinese art, nature, and philosophy. Between 1974 and 1985 she contributed over sixty of them to the Christian Science Monitor, some forty-five of which are included in Fishing on the Terrace. Tanenbaum's ability to fuse her twentieth-century perceptions of nature seamlessly with the nature invoked by Chinese landscape paintings encourages the reader of the articles to become a "fisherman" as well. Her writing's powerful ideas can easily overtake a quiet afternoon spent in the mountains or even a morning meditation in one's own garden. The distinct wisdom that Tanenbaum imparts in each of her reflections is accentuated here by the accompanying illustrations. Alongside the articles, one will find beautiful color reproductions of the Chinese paintings and objects that inspired them. Today more than ever—with our twenty-first-century predisposition toward environmentalism, Eastern thought, and a return to nature—Tanenbaum's writings echo with the clear tone of inescapable truths. They are available for the first time as a collection, to be enjoyed for years to come.

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Decentering Citizenship follows three groups of Filipina migrants' struggles to belong in South Korea: factory workers claiming rights as workers, wives of South Korean men claiming rights as mothers, and hostesses at American military clubs who are excluded from claims—unless they claim to be victims of trafficking. Moving beyond laws and policies, Hae Yeon Choo examines how rights are enacted, translated, and challenged in daily life and ultimately interrogates the concept of citizenship. Choo reveals citizenship as a language of social and personal transformation within the pursuit of dignity, security, and mobility. Her vivid ethnography of both migrants and their South Korean advocates illuminates how social inequalities of gender, race, class, and nation operate in defining citizenship. Decentering Citizenship argues that citizenship emerges from negotiations about rights and belonging between South Koreans and migrants. As the promise of equal rights and full membership in a polity erodes in the face of global inequalities, this decentering illuminates important contestation at the margins of citizenship.

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How did you first hear about 9/11? What images come to mind when you think of Hurricane Katrina? How did your community react to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting? You likely have your own stories about these tragic events. Yet, as a society, we rarely stop to appreciate the narratives that follow a crisis and their tremendous impact. This book examines the fundamental role that narratives play in catastrophic events. A crisis creates a communication vacuum, which is then populated by the stories of those who were directly affected, as well as crisis managers, journalists, and onlookers. These stories become fundamental to how we understand a disaster, determine what should be done about it, and carry forward our lessons learned. Matthew W. Seeger and Timothy L. Sellnow outline a typology of crisis narratives: accounts of blame, stories of renewal, victim narratives, heroic tales, and memorials. Using cases to illustrate each type, they show how competing accounts battle for dominance in the public sphere, advancing specific organizational, social, and political changes. Narratives of Crisis improves our understanding of how consensus forms in the aftermath of a disaster, providing a new lens for comprehending events in our past and shaping what comes from those in our future.

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Prozak Diaries is an analysis of emerging psychiatric discourses in post-1980s Iran. It examines a cultural shift in how people interpret and express their feeling states, by adopting the language of psychiatry, and shows how experiences that were once articulated in the richly layered poetics of the Persian language became, by the 1990s, part of a clinical discourse on mood and affect. In asking how psychiatric dialect becomes a language of everyday, the book analyzes cultural forms created by this clinical discourse, exploring individual, professional, and generational cultures of medicalization in various sites from clinical encounters and psychiatric training, to intimate interviews, works of art and media, and Persian blogs. Through the lens of psychiatry, the book reveals how historical experiences are negotiated and how generations are formed. Orkideh Behrouzan traces the historical circumstances that prompted the development of psychiatric discourses in Iran and reveals the ways in which they both reflect and actively shape Iranians' cultural sensibilities. A physician and an anthropologist, she combines clinical and anthropological perspectives in order to investigate the gray areas between memory and everyday life, between individual symptoms and generational remembering. Prozak Diaries offers an exploration of language as experience. In interpreting clinical and generational narratives, Behrouzan writes not only a history of psychiatry in contemporary Iran, but a story of how stories are told.

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Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

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Many liberal-minded Western democracies pride themselves on their commitments to egalitarianism, the fair treatment of immigrants, and the right to education. These environments would seem to provide a best-case scenario for the reception of immigrant youth. But that is not always the case. Coercive Concern explores how stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal societies flow through public schools into everyday interactions, informing how Muslim youth are perceived by teachers and peers. Beyond simply identifying the presence of racialized speech in schools, this book uncovers how coercive assimilation is cloaked in benevolent narratives of care and concern. Coercive Concern provides an ethnographic critique of the "concern" that animates integration policy in Danish schools. Reva Jaffe-Walter focuses on the experiences of Muslim youth at a public school where over 40% of the student body is of immigrant descent, showing how schools operate as sites of governance. These efforts are led by political leaders who promote national fears of immigrant take-over, by teachers in schools, and by everyday citizens who are concerned about "problems" of immigration. Jaffe-Walter exposes the psychic and material costs immigrant youth endure when living in the shadow of social scrutiny, but she also charts a path forward by uncovering the resources these youth need to attain social mobility and success.

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Set in late sixteenth-century Spain, this book tells the gripping story of Lucrecia de León, a young woman of modest background who gained a dangerously popular reputation as a prophetic dreamer predicting apocalyptic ruin for her country. When Lucrecia was still a teenager, several Catholic priests took great interest in her prolific dreams and began to record them in detail. But the growing public attention to the dreams eventually became too much for the Spanish king. Stung that Lucrecia had accurately foreseen the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, Philip II ordered the Inquisition to arrest her on charges of heresy and sedition. During Lucrecia's imprisonment, trial, and torture, the carefully collected records of her dreams were preserved and analyzed by the court. The authenticity of these dreams, and their potentially explosive significance, became the focal point of the Church's investigation. Returning to these records of a dreamer from another era, Lucrecia the Dreamer is the first book to examine Lucrecia's dreams as dreams, as accurate reports of psychological experiences with roots in the brain's natural cycles of activity during sleep. Using methods from the cognitive science of religion, dream researcher Kelly Bulkeley finds meaningful patterns in Lucrecia's dreaming prophecies and sheds new light on the infinitely puzzling question at the center of her trial, a question that has vexed all religious traditions throughout history: How can we determine if a dream is, or is not, a true revelation?

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From precious jade articles to monumental stone arches, Huizhou salt merchants in Jiangnan lived surrounded by objects in eighteenth-century China. How and why did these businessmen devote themselves to these items? What can we learn about eighteenth-century China by examining the relationship between merchants and objects? Luxurious Networks examines Huizhou salt merchants in the material world of High Qing China to reveal a dynamic interaction between people and objects. The Qianlong emperor purposely used objects to expand his influence in economic and cultural fields. Thanks to their broad networks, outstanding managerial skills, and abundant financial resources, these salt merchants were ideal agents for selecting and producing objects for imperial use. In contrast to the typical caricature of merchants as mimics of the literati, these wealthy businessmen became respected individuals who played a crucial role in the political, economic, social, and cultural world of eighteenth-century China. Their life experiences illustrate the dynamic relationship between the Manchu and Han, central and local, and humans and objects in Chinese history.

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Field Notes reconstructs the origins and trajectory of area studies in the United States, focusing on Middle East studies from the 1920s to the 1980s. Drawing on extensive archival research, Zachary Lockman shows how the Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Ford foundations played key roles in conceiving, funding, and launching postwar area studies, expecting them to yield a new kind of interdisciplinary knowledge that would advance the social sciences while benefiting government agencies and the American people. Lockman argues, however, that these new academic fields were not simply a product of the Cold War or an instrument of the American national security state, but had roots in shifts in the humanities and the social sciences over the interwar years, as well as in World War II sites and practices. This book explores the decision-making processes and visions of knowledge production at the foundations, the Social Science Research Council, and others charged with guiding the intellectual and institutional development of Middle East studies. Ultimately, Field Notes uncovers how area studies as an academic field was actually built—a process replete with contention, anxiety, dead ends, and consequences both unanticipated and unintended.

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Scholars have long examined the relationship between nation-states and their "internal others," such as immigrants and ethnoracial minorities. Contested Embrace shifts the analytic focus to explore how a state relates to people it views as "external members" such as emigrants and diasporas. Specifically, Jaeeun Kim analyzes disputes over the belonging of Koreans in Japan and China, focusing on their contested relationship with the colonial and postcolonial states in the Korean peninsula. Extending the constructivist approach to nationalisms and the culturalist view of the modern state to a transnational context, Contested Embrace illuminates the political and bureaucratic construction of ethno-national populations beyond the territorial boundary of the state. Through a comparative analysis of transborder membership politics in the colonial, Cold War, and post-Cold War periods, the book shows how the configuration of geopolitics, bureaucratic techniques, and actors' agency shapes the making, unmaking, and remaking of transborder ties. Kim demonstrates that being a "homeland" state or a member of the "transborder nation" is a precarious, arduous, and revocable political achievement.

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Stories abound of immigrant Jews on the outside looking in, clambering up the ladder of social mobility, successfully assimilating and integrating into their new worlds. But this book is not about the success stories. It's a paean to the bunglers, the blockheads, and the just plain weird—Jews who were flung from small, impoverished eastern European towns into the urban shtetls of New York and Warsaw, where, as they say in Yiddish, their bread landed butter side down in the dirt. These marginal Jews may have found their way into the history books far less frequently than their more socially upstanding neighbors, but there's one place you can find them in force: in the Yiddish newspapers that had their heyday from the 1880s to the 1930s. Disaster, misery, and misfortune: you will find no better chronicle of the daily ignominies of urban Jewish life than in the pages of the Yiddish press. An underground history of downwardly mobile Jews, Bad Rabbi exposes the seamy underbelly of pre-WWII New York and Warsaw, the two major centers of Yiddish culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With true stories plucked from the pages of the Yiddish papers, Eddy Portnoy introduces us to the drunks, thieves, murderers, wrestlers, poets, and beauty queens whose misadventures were immortalized in print. There's the Polish rabbi blackmailed by an American widow, mass brawls at weddings and funerals, a psychic who specialized in locating missing husbands, and violent gangs of Jewish mothers on the prowl—in short, not quite the Jews you'd expect. One part Isaac Bashevis Singer, one part Jerry Springer, this irreverent, unvarnished, and frequently hilarious compendium of stories provides a window into an unknown Yiddish world that was.

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Recognizing their role as "corporate citizens," companies are seeking guidance on how to be true to their missions, principled in practice, and well regarded for their contributions to society. As this book reveals, the key lies in sincerity—the sum of values like authenticity, integrity, and trust. Countess Alexandra Christina, a European corporate director, and Timothy L. Fort, a leading American scholar, delineate a clear and actionable model for bringing sincerity to the business context. Their vision for sincerity complies with law, aligns corporate social and financial performance, and values corporate ethics in its own right, rather than as a means to an end. Underpinning this model is a synthesis of the top research in the field and a suite of new interviews with current and former CEOs. Tracing inspirational tales and scandals alike, this book shows how leaders can head up companies that more reliably make good decisions and conduct themselves in a trustworthy manner. It then concludes with twelve concrete actions that businesses can take to cultivate "the sincerity edge."

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As entrenched bureaucracies, military organizations might reasonably be expected to be especially resistant to reform and favor only limited, incremental adjustments. Yet, since 1945, the U.S. Army has rewritten its capstone doctrine manual, Operations, fourteen times. While some modifications have been incremental, collectively they reflect a significant evolution in how the Army approaches warfare—making the U.S. Army a crucial and unique case of a modern land power that is capable of change. So what accounts for this anomaly? What institutional processes have professional officers developed over time to escape bureaucracies' iron cage? Forging the Sword conducts a comparative historical process-tracing of doctrinal reform in the U.S. Army. The findings suggest that there are unaccounted-for institutional facilitators of change within military organizations. Thus, it argues that change in military organizations requires "incubators," designated subunits established outside the normal bureaucratic hierarchy, and "advocacy networks" championing new concepts. Incubators, ranging from special study groups to non-Title 10 war games and field exercises, provide a safe space for experimentation and the construction of new operational concepts. Advocacy networks then connect different constituents and inject them with concepts developed in incubators. This injection makes changes elites would have otherwise rejected a contagious narrative.

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From 1793 to 1805, yellow fever devastated U.S. port cities in a series of terrifying epidemics. The search for the cause and prevention of the disease involved many prominent American intellectuals, including Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush. This investigation produced one of the most substantial and innovative outpourings of scientific thought in early American history. But it also led to a heated and divisive debate—both political and theological—around the place of science in American society. Feverish Bodies, Enlightened Minds opens an important window onto the conduct of scientific inquiry in the early American republic. The debate between "contagionists," who thought the disease was imported, and "localists," who thought it came from domestic sources, reflected contemporary beliefs about God and creation, the capacities of the human mind, and even the appropriate direction of the new nation. Through this thoughtful investigation of the yellow fever epidemic and engaging examination of natural science in early America, Thomas Apel demonstrates that the scientific imaginations of early republicans were far broader than historians have realized: in order to understand their science, we must understand their ideas about God.

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In the work of writer Abe Kōbō (1924–1993), characters are alienated both from themselves and from one another. Through close readings of Abe's work, Richard Calichman reveals how time and writing have the ability to unground identity. Over time, attempts to create unity of self cause alienation, despite government attempts to convince people to form communities (and nations) to recapture a sense of wholeness. Art, then, must resist the nation-state and expose its false ideologies. Calichman argues that Abe's attack on the concept of national affiliation has been neglected through his inscription as a writer of Japanese literature. At the same time, the institution of Japan Studies works to tighten the bond between nation-state and individual subject. Through Abe's essays and short stories, he shows how the formation of community is constantly displaced by the notions of time and writing. Beyond Nation thus analyzes the elements of Orientalism, culturalism, and racism that often underlie the appeal to collective Japanese identity.

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My Journey at the Nuclear Brink is a continuation of William J. Perry's efforts to keep the world safe from a nuclear catastrophe. It tells the story of his coming of age in the nuclear era, his role in trying to shape and contain it, and how his thinking has changed about the threat these weapons pose. In a remarkable career, Perry has dealt firsthand with the changing nuclear threat. Decades of experience and special access to top-secret knowledge of strategic nuclear options have given Perry a unique, and chilling, vantage point from which to conclude that nuclear weapons endanger our security rather than securing it. This book traces his thought process as he journeys from the Cuban Missile Crisis, to crafting a defense strategy in the Carter Administration to offset the Soviets' numeric superiority in conventional forces, to presiding over the dismantling of more than 8,000 nuclear weapons in the Clinton Administration, and to his creation in 2007, with George Shultz, Sam Nunn, and Henry Kissinger, of the Nuclear Security Project to articulate their vision of a world free from nuclear weapons and to lay out the urgent steps needed to reduce nuclear dangers.

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American law schools are in deep crisis. Enrollment is down, student loan debt is up, and the profession's supply of high-paying jobs is shrinking. Meanwhile, thousands of graduates remain underemployed while the legal needs of low-income communities go substantially unmet. Many blame overregulation and seek a "free" market to solve the problem, but this has already been tested. Seizing on a deregulatory policy shift at the American Bar Association, private equity financiers established the first for-profit law schools in the early 2000s with the stated mission to increase access to justice by "serving the underserved". Pursuing this mission at a feverish rate of growth, they offered the promise of professional upward mobility through high-tech, simplified teaching and learning. In Law Mart, a vivid ethnography of one such environment, Riaz Tejani argues that the rise of for-profit law schools shows the limits of a market-based solution to American access to justice. Building on theories in law, political economy, and moral anthropology, Tejani reveals how for-profit law schools marketed themselves directly to ethnoracial and socioeconomic "minority" communities, relaxed admission standards, increased diversity, shook up established curricula, and saw student success rates plummet. They contributed to a dramatic rise in U.S. law student debt burdens while charging premium tuition financed up-front through federal loans over time. If economic theories have so influenced legal scholarship, what happens when they come to shape law school transactions, governance, and oversight? For students promised professional citizenship by these institutions, is there a need for protections that better uphold institutional quality and sustainability? Offering an unprecedented glimpse of this landscape, Law Mart is a colorful foray into these essential questions.

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Recovering Armenia offers the first in-depth study of the aftermath of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and the Armenians who remained in Turkey. Following World War I, as the victorious Allied powers occupied Ottoman territories, Armenian survivors returned to their hometowns optimistic that they might establish an independent Armenia. But Turkish resistance prevailed, and by 1923 the Allies withdrew, the Turkish Republic was established, and Armenians were left again to reconstruct their communities within a country that still considered them traitors. Lerna Ekmekcioglu investigates how Armenians recovered their identity within these drastically changing political conditions. Reading Armenian texts and images produced in Istanbul from the close of WWI through the early 1930s, Ekmekcioglu gives voice to the community's most prominent public figures, notably Hayganush Mark, a renowned activist, feminist, and editor of the influential journal Hay Gin. These public figures articulated an Armenianess sustained through gendered differences, and women came to play a central role preserving traditions, memory, and the mother tongue within the home. But even as women were being celebrated for their traditional roles, a strong feminist movement found opportunity for leadership within the community. Ultimately, the book explores this paradox: how someone could be an Armenian and a feminist in post-genocide Turkey when, through its various laws and regulations, the key path for Armenians to maintain their identity was through traditionally gendered roles.

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In the sixteenth century, silver mined by native peoples became New Spain's most important export. Silver production served as a catalyst for northern expansion, creating mining towns that led to the development of new industries, markets, population clusters, and frontier institutions. Within these towns, the need for labor, raw materials, resources, and foodstuffs brought together an array of different ethnic and social groups—Spaniards, Indians, Africans, and ethnically mixed individuals or castas. On the northern edge of the empire, 350 miles from Mexico City, sprung up Zacatecas, a silver-mining town that would grow in prominence to become the "Second City of New Spain." Urban Indians in a Silver City illuminates the social footprint of colonial Mexico's silver mining district. It reveals the men, women, children, and families that shaped indigenous society and shifts the view of indigenous peoples from mere laborers to settlers and vecinos (municipal residents). Dana Velasco Murillo shows how native peoples exploited the urban milieu to create multiple statuses and identities that allowed them to live in Zacatecas as both Indians and vecinos. In reconsidering traditional paradigms about ethnicity and identity among the urban Indian population, she raises larger questions about the nature and rate of cultural change in the Mexican north.

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China's One Child Policy and its rigorous national focus on educational testing are well known. But what happens to those "lucky" few at the very top of the pyramid: elite university students in China who grew up under the One Child Policy and now attend the nation's most prestigious universities? How do they feel about having made it to the top of an extremely competitive educational system—as their parents' only child? What pressures do they face, and how do they cope with the expectations associated with being the best? Fragile Elite explores the contradictions and perplexities of being an elite student through immersive ethnographic research conducted at two top universities in China. Susanne Bregnbæk uncovers the intimate psychological strains students suffer under the pressure imposed on them by parents and state, where the state acts as a parent and the parents reinforce the state. Fragile Elite offers fascinating insights into the intergenerational tensions at work in relation to the ongoing shift in educational policy and definition of what a "quality" student, child, and citizen is in contemporary China.

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Stakeholders in the organic food movement agree that it has the potential to transform our food system, and yet there is little consensus about what this transformation should look like. Tracing the history of the organic food sector, Michael A. Haedicke charts the development of two narratives that do more than simply polarize the organic debate, they give way to competing institutional logics. On the one hand, social activists contend that organics can break up the concentration of power that rests in the hands of a big, traditional agribusiness. Alternatively, professionals who are steeped in the culture of business emphasize the potential for market growth, for fostering better behemoths. Independent food store owners are then left to reconcile these ideas as they construct their professional identities and hone their business strategies. Drawing on extensive interviews and unique archival sources, Haedicke looks at how these groups make sense of their everyday work. He pays particular attention to instances in which individuals overcome the conflicting narratives of industry transformation and market expansion by creating new cultural concepts and organizational forms. At once an account of the sector's development and an analysis of individual choices within it, Organizing Organic provides a nuanced account of the way the organic movement continues to negotiate ethical values and economic productivity.

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Doing business in China can be hazardous to your health. Occupational Hazards follows a group of Chinese businessmen and government officials as they conduct business in Beijing and western Yunnan Province, exposing webs of informal networks that help businessmen access political favors. These networks are built over liquor, cigarettes, food, and sex, turning risky behaviors into occupational hazards. Elanah Uretsky's ethnography follows these powerful men and their vulnerabilities to China's burgeoning epidemics of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and HIV/AIDS. Examining the relationship between elite masculine networking practices and vulnerability to HIV infection, Occupational Hazards includes the stories of countless government officials and businessmen who regularly visit commercial sex workers but resist HIV testing for fear of threatening their economic and political status. Their fate is further complicated by a political system that cannot publicly acknowledge such risk and by authoritative international paradigms that limit the reach of public health interventions. Ultimately, Uretsky offers insights into how complex socio-cultural and politico-economic negotiations affect the development and administration of China's HIV epidemic.

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While European powers were at war with the Ottoman Empire for much of the eighteenth century, European opera houses were staging operas featuring singing sultans and pashas surrounded by their musical courts and harems. Mozart wrote The Abduction from the Seraglio. Rossini created a series of works, including The Italian Girl in Algiers. And these are only the best known of a vast repertory. This book explores how these representations of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, the great nemesis of Christian Europe, became so popular in the opera house and what they illustrate about European–Ottoman international relations. After Christian armies defeated the Ottomans at Vienna in 1683, the Turks no longer seemed as threatening. Europeans increasingly understood that Turkish issues were also European issues, and the political absolutism of the sultan in Istanbul was relevant for thinking about politics in Europe, from the reign of Louis XIV to the age of Napoleon. While Christian European composers and publics recognized that Muslim Turks were, to some degree, different from themselves, this difference was sometimes seen as a matter of exotic costume and setting. The singing Turks of the stage expressed strong political perspectives and human emotions that European audiences could recognize as their own.

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Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

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In 2000, the U.S. passed a major aid package that was going to help Colombia do it all: cut drug trafficking, defeat leftist guerrillas, support peace, and build democracy. More than 80% of the assistance, however, was military aid, at a time when the Colombian security forces were linked to abusive, drug-trafficking paramilitary forces. Drugs, Thugs, and Diplomats examines the U.S. policymaking process in the design, implementation, and consequences of Plan Colombia, as the aid package came to be known. Winifred Tate explores the rhetoric and practice of foreign policy by the U.S. State Department, the Pentagon, Congress, and the U.S. military Southern Command. Tate's ethnography uncovers how policymakers' utopian visions and emotional entanglements play a profound role in their efforts to orchestrate and impose social transformation abroad. She argues that U.S. officials' zero tolerance for illegal drugs provided the ideological architecture for the subsequent militarization of domestic drug policy abroad. The U.S. also ignored Colombian state complicity with paramilitary brutality, presenting them as evidence of an absent state and the authentic expression of a frustrated middle class. For rural residents of Colombia living under paramilitary dominion, these denials circulated as a form of state terror. Tate's analysis examines how oppositional activists and the policy's targets—civilians and local state officials in southern Colombia—attempted to shape aid design and delivery, revealing the process and effects of human rights policymaking.

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The U.S. government has essentially two choices when dealing with adversarial states: isolate them or engage them. Isolate or Engage systematically examines the challenges to and opportunities for U.S. diplomatic relations with nine intensely adversarial states—China, Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, U.S.S.R./Russia, Syria, Venezuela, and Vietnam: states where the situation is short of conventional war and where the U.S. maintains limited or no formal diplomatic relations with the government. In such circumstances, "public diplomacy"—the means by which the U.S. engages with citizens in other countries so they will push their own governments to adopt less hostile and more favorable views of U.S. foreign policies—becomes extremely important for shaping the context within which the adversarial government makes important decisions affecting U.S. national security interests. At a time when the norm of not talking to the enemy is a matter of public debate, the book examines the role of both traditional and public diplomacy with adversarial states and reviews the costs and benefits of U.S. diplomatic engagement with the publics of these countries. It concludes that while public diplomacy is not a panacea for easing conflict in interstate relations, it is one of many productive channels that a government can use in order to stay informed about the status of its relations with an adversarial state, and to seek to improve those relations.

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Since the British colonial period anthropology has been central to policy in India. But today, while the Indian state continues to use ethnography to govern, those who were the "objects" of study are harnessing disciplinary knowledge to redefine their communities, achieve greater prosperity, and secure political rights. In this groundbreaking study, Townsend Middleton tracks these newfound "lives" of anthropology. Offering simultaneous ethnographies of the people of Darjeeling's quest for "tribal" status and the government anthropologists handling their claims, Middleton exposes how minorities are—and are not—recognized for affirmative action and autonomy. We encounter communities putting on elaborate spectacles of sacrifice, exorcism, bows and arrows, and blood drinking to prove their "primitiveness" and "backwardness." Conversely, we see government anthropologists struggle for the ethnographic truth as communities increasingly turn academic paradigms back upon the state. The Demands of Recognition offers a compelling look at the escalating politics of tribal recognition in India. At once ethnographic and historical, it chronicles how multicultural governance has motivated the people of Darjeeling to ethnologically redefine themselves—from Gorkha to tribal and back. But as these communities now know, not all forms of difference are legible in the eyes of the state. The Gorkhas' search for recognition has only amplified these communities' anxieties about who they are—and who they must be—if they are to attain the rights, autonomy, and belonging they desire.

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Divine Variations offers a new account of the development of scientific ideas about race. Focusing on the production of scientific knowledge over the last three centuries, Terence Keel uncovers the persistent links between pre-modern Christian thought and contemporary scientific perceptions of human difference. He argues that, instead of a rupture between religion and modern biology on the question of human origins, modern scientific theories of race are, in fact, an extension of Christian intellectual history. Keel's study draws on ancient and early modern theological texts and biblical commentaries, works in Christian natural philosophy, seminal studies in ethnology and early social science, debates within twentieth-century public health research, and recent genetic analysis of population differences and ancient human DNA. From these sources, Keel demonstrates that Christian ideas about creation, ancestry, and universalism helped form the basis of modern scientific accounts of human diversity—despite the ostensible shift in modern biology towards scientific naturalism, objectivity, and value neutrality. By showing the connections between Christian thought and scientific racial thinking, this book calls into question the notion that science and religion are mutually exclusive intellectual domains and proposes that the advance of modern science did not follow a linear process of secularization.

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Egypt came to govern Gaza as a result of a war, a failed effort to maintain Arab Palestine. Throughout the twenty years of its administration (1948–1967), Egyptian policing of Gaza concerned itself not only with crime and politics, but also with control of social and moral order. Through surveillance, interrogation, and a network of local informants, the police extended their reach across the public domain and into private life, seeing Palestinians as both security threats and vulnerable subjects who needed protection. Security practices produced suspicion and safety simultaneously. Police Encounters explores the paradox of Egyptian rule. Drawing on a rich and detailed archive of daily police records, the book describes an extensive security apparatus guided by intersecting concerns about national interest, social propriety, and everyday illegality. In pursuit of security, Egyptian policing established a relatively safe society, but also one that blocked independent political activity. The repressive aspects of the security society that developed in Gaza under Egyptian rule are beyond dispute. But repression does not tell the entire story about its impact on Gaza. Policing also provided opportunities for people to make claims of government, influence their neighbors, and protect their families.

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Racism has never been simple. It wasn't more obvious in the past, and it isn't less potent now. From the birth of the United States to the contemporary police shooting death of an unarmed Black youth, Beneath the Surface of White Supremacy investigates ingrained practices of racism, as well as unquestioned assumptions in the study of racism, to upend and deepen our understanding. In Moon-Kie Jung's unsettling book, Dred Scott v. Sandford, the notorious 1857 Supreme Court case, casts a shadow over current immigration debates and the "war on terror." The story of a 1924 massacre of Filipino sugar workers in Hawai'i pairs with statistical relentlessness of Black economic suffering to shed light on hidden dimensions of mass ignorance and indifference. The histories of Asians, Blacks, Latina/os, and Natives relate in knotty ways. State violence and colonialism come to the fore in taking measure of the United States, past and present, while the undue importance of assimilation and colorblindness recedes. Ultimately, Jung challenges the dominant racial common sense and develops new concepts and theory for radically rethinking and resisting racisms.

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Why do presidents and their advisors often make sub-optimal decisions on military intervention, escalation, de-escalation, and termination of conflicts? The leading concept of group dynamics, groupthink, offers one explanation: policy-making groups make sub-optimal decisions due to their desire for conformity and uniformity over dissent, leading to a failure to consider other relevant possibilities. But presidential advisory groups are often fragmented and divisive. This book therefore scrutinizes polythink, a group decision-making dynamic whereby different members in a decision-making unit espouse a plurality of opinions and divergent policy prescriptions, resulting in a disjointed decision-making process or even decision paralysis. The book analyzes eleven national security decisions, including the national security policy designed prior to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the decisions to enter into and withdraw from Afghanistan and Iraq, the 2007 "surge" decision, the crisis over the Iranian nuclear program, the UN Security Council decision on the Syrian Civil War, the faltering Kerry Peace Process in the Middle East, and the U.S. decision on military operations against ISIS. Based on the analysis of these case studies, the authors address implications of the polythink phenomenon, including prescriptions for avoiding and/or overcoming it, and develop strategies and tools for what they call Productive Polythink. The authors also show the applicability of polythink to business, industry, and everyday decisions.

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From 2007 to 2012, almost five percent of American adults—about ten million people—lost their homes because they could not make mortgage payments. The scale of this home mortgage crisis is unprecedented—and it's not over. Foreclosures still displace more American homeowners every year than at any time before the twenty-first century. The dispossession and forced displacement of American families affects their health, educational success, and access to jobs. It continues to block any real recovery in the hardest-hit communities. While we now know a lot about how this crisis affected the global economy, we still know very little about how it affected the people who lost their homes. Foreclosed America offers the first representative portrait of those people—who they are, how and where they live after losing their homes, and what they have to say about their finances, their neighborhoods, and American politics. It is a sobering picture of Americans down on their luck, and of a crisis that is testing American democracy.

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Most regions of the world are plagued by conflicts that are made insoluble by a confluence of complex threads from history, geography, politics, and culture. These "frozen conflicts" defy conflict management interventions by both internal and external agents and institutions. Worse, they constantly threaten to extend beyond their local geographies, as in the terrorist bombings in Boston by ethnic Chechens, or to escalate from skirmishes to full-scale war, as in Nagorno-Karabakh. Consequently, such conflicts cry out for alternative approaches to the classic, state-focused, and sovereignty-based conflict management models that are practiced in traditional diplomacy—which most often produce rather short-term, ad hoc, fragmented interventions and outcomes. Drawing upon the cases of the South Caucasus, the Western Balkans, Central America, South East Asia, and Northern Ireland, Networked Regionalism as Conflict Management offers a theoretical and practical solution to this impasse by arguing for regional collective interventions that involve a long-term reengineering of existing conflict management infrastructure on the ground. Such approaches have been attracting the attention of scholars and practitioners alike yet, thus far, these concepts have rarely involved more than simple prescriptions for regional cooperation between grassroots actors and traditional diplomacy. Specifically, says Anna Ohanyan, only the cultivation and establishment of regional peace systems can provide an effective path toward conflict management in these standoffs in such intractably divided regions.

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Souffles-Anfas: A Critical Anthology from the Moroccan Journal of Culture and Politics introduces and makes available, for the first time in English, an incandescent corpus of experimental leftist writing from North Africa. Founded in 1966 by Abdellatif Laâbi and a small group of avant-garde Moroccan poets and artists and banned in 1972, Souffles-Anfas was one of the most influential literary, cultural, and political reviews to emerge in postcolonial North Africa. An early forum for tricontinental postcolonial thought and writing, the journal published texts ranging from experimental poems, literary manifestos, and abstract art to political tracts, open letters, and interviews by contributors from the Maghreb, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. The essays, poems, and artwork included in this anthology—by the likes of Abdelkebir Khatibi, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Albert Memmi, Etel Adnan, Sembene Ousmane, René Depestre, and Mohamed Melehi—offer a unique window into the political and artistic imaginaries of writers and intellectuals from the Global South, and resonate with particular acuity in the wake of the Arab Spring. A critical introduction and section headnotes make this collection the perfect companion for courses in postcolonial theory, world literature, and poetry in translation.

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This volume of correspondence, the last in a three-volume edition, spans a pivotal moment in American history: the mid-twentieth century, from the beginning of World War II, through the years of rebuilding and uneasy peace that followed, to the election of President John F. Kennedy. Robinson Jeffers published four important books during this period—Be Angry at the Sun (1941), Medea (1946), The Double Axe (1948), and Hungerfield (1954). He also faced changes to his hometown village of Carmel, experienced the rewards of being a successful dramatist in the United States and abroad, and endured the loss of his wife Una. Jeffers' letters, and those of Una written in the decade prior to her death, offer a vivid chronicle of the life and times of a singular and visionary poet.

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The visible increase in religious practice among young European-born Muslims has provoked public anxiety. New government regulations seek not only to restrict Islamic practices within the public sphere, but also to shape Muslims', and especially women's, personal conduct. Pious Practice and Secular Constraints chronicles the everyday ethical struggles of women active in orthodox and socially conservative Islamic revival circles as they are torn between their quest for a pious lifestyle and their aspirations to counter negative representations of Muslims within the mainstream society. Jeanette S. Jouili conducted fieldwork in France and Germany to investigate how pious Muslim women grapple with religious expression: for example, when to wear a headscarf, where to pray throughout the day, and how to maintain modest interactions between men and women. Her analysis stresses the various ethical dilemmas the women confronted in negotiating these religious duties within a secular public sphere. In conversation with Islamic and Western thinkers, Jouili teases out the important ethical-political implications of these struggles, ultimately arguing that Muslim moral agency, surprisingly reinvigorated rather than hampered by the increasingly hostile climate in Europe, encourages us to think about the contribution of non-secular civic virtues for shaping a pluralist Europe.

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In recent years there have been reports of actions purportedly taken by People's Liberation Army (PLA) units without civilian authorization, and of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) civilian leaders seeking to curry favor with the military—suggesting that a nationalistic and increasingly influential PLA is driving more assertive Chinese policies on a range of military and sovereignty issues. To many experienced PLA watchers, however, the PLA remains a "party-army" that is responsive to orders from the CCP. PLA Influence on China's National Security Policymaking seeks to assess the "real" relationship between the PLA and its civilian masters by moving beyond media and pundit speculation to mount an in-depth examination and explanation of the PLA's role in national security policymaking. After examining the structural factors that shape PLA interactions with the Party-State, the book uses case studies to explore the PLA's role in foreign policy crises. It then assesses the PLA's role in China's territorial disputes and in military interactions with civilian government and business, exploring the military's role in China's civil–military integration development strategy. The evidence reveals that today's PLA does appear to have more influence on purely military issues than in the past—but much less influence on political issues—and to be more actively engaged in policy debates on mixed civil-military issues where military equities are at stake.

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Gaining Freedoms reveals a new locus for global political change: everyday urban contestation. Cities are often assumed hotbeds of socio-economic division, but this assessment overlooks the importance of urban space and the everyday activities of urban life for empowerment, emancipation, and democratization. Through proximity, neighborhoods, streets, and squares can create unconventional power contestations over lifestyle and consumption. And through struggle, negotiation, and cooperation, competing claims across groups can become platforms to defend freedom and rights from government encroachments. Drawing on more than seven years of fieldwork in three contested urban sites—a downtown neighborhood and a university campus in Istanbul, and a Turkish neighborhood in Berlin—Berna Turam shows how democratic contestation echoes through urban space. Countering common assumptions that Turkey is strongly polarized between Islamists and secularists, she illustrates how contested urban space encourages creative politics, the kind of politics that advance rights, expression, and representation shared between pious and secular groups. Exceptional moments of protest, like the recent Gezi protests which bookend this study, offer clear external signs of upheaval and disruption, but it is the everyday contestation and interaction that forge alliances and inspire change. Ultimately, Turam argues that the process of democratization is not the reduction of conflict, but rather the capacity to form new alliances out of conflict.

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The Yield is a once-in-a-generation reinterpretation of the oeuvre of Franz Kafka. At the same time, it is a powerful new entry in the debates about the supposed secularity of the modern age. Kafka is one of the most admired writers of the last century, but this book presents us with a Kafka few will recognize. It does so through a fine-grained analysis of the three hundred "thoughts" the writer penned near the end of World War I, when he had just been diagnosed with tuberculosis. Since they were discovered after Kafka's death, the meaning of the so-called "Zürau aphorisms" has been open to debate. Paul North's elucidation of what amounts to Kafka's only theoretical work shows them to contain solutions to problems Europe has faced throughout modernity. Kafka offers responses to phenomena of violence, discrimination, political repression, misunderstanding, ethnic hatred, fantasies of technological progress, and the subjugation of the worker, among other problems. Reflecting on secular modernity and the theological ideas that continue to determine it, he critiques the ideas of sin, suffering, the messiah, paradise, truth, the power of art, good will, and knowledge. Kafka's controversial alternative to the bad state of affairs in his day? Rather than fight it, give in. Developing some of Kafka's arguments, The Yield describes the ways that Kafka envisions we can be good by "yielding" to our situation instead of striving for something better.

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Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed readers ever since it emerged in medieval Spain over seven hundred years ago. Written in lyrical Aramaic, this masterpiece of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of mystical literature, comprising over twenty sections. The bulk of the Zohar consists of mystical interpretation of the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy. The ninth volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition completes this running commentary on the Torah. Rabbi Shim'on and his Companions explore passages from the middle of the book of Numbers through the end of Deuteronomy. Among the remarkable sections is Rav Metivta, an account of a visionary journey by Rabbi Shim'on and some of the Companions to the Garden of Eden, where they discover secrets of the afterlife. Later in the volume appears the story of the Yanuqa (Child)—a wunderkind-and-enfant-terrible who amazes and teases, challenges and stumps the rabbis. Near the very end of the Zohar on the Torah comes the remarkable section known as Idra Zuta (The Small Assembly). This dramatic narrative describes the last gathering of Rabbi Shim'on and the Companions before his death. Here the master reveals profound mysteries of divine being, and then departs from this world to unite ecstatically with the Divine Feminine, Shekhinah. Before departing, Rabbi Shim'on invites all of the Companions to his wedding celebration above.

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China's Futures cuts through the sometimes confounding and unfounded speculation of international pundits and commentators to provide readers with an important yet overlooked set of complex views concerning China's future: views originating within China itself. Daniel Lynch seeks to answer the simple but rarely asked question: how do China's own leaders and other elite figures assess their country's future?Many Western social scientists, business leaders, journalists, technocrats, analysts, and policymakers convey confident predictions about the future of China's rise. Every day, the business, political, and even entertainment news is filled with stories and commentary not only on what is happening in China now, but also what Western experts confidently think will happen in the future. Typically missing from these accounts is how people of power and influence in China itself imagine their country's developmental course. Yet the assessments of elites in a still super-authoritarian country like China should make a critical difference in what the national trajectory eventually becomes. In China's Futures, Lynch traces the varying possible national trajectories based on how China's own specialists are evaluating their country's current course, and his book is the first to assess the strengths and weaknesses of "predictioneering" in Western social science as applied to China. It does so by examining Chinese debates in five critical issue-areas concerning China's trajectory: the economy, domestic political processes and institutions, communication and the Internet (arrival of the "network society"), foreign policy strategy, and international soft-power (cultural) competition.

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Powerful countries like the United States regularly employ economic sanctions as a tool for promoting their foreign policy interests. Yet this foreign policy tool has an uninspiring track record of success, with economic sanctions achieving their goals less than a third of the time they are imposed. The costs of these failed sanctions policies can be significant for the states that impose them, their targets, and the other countries they affect. Explaining economic sanctions' high failure rate therefore constitutes a vital endeavor for academics and policy-makers alike. Busted Sanctions seeks to provide this explanation, and reveals that the primary cause of this failure is third-party spoilers, or sanctions busters, who undercut sanctioning efforts by providing their targets with extensive foreign aid or sanctions-busting trade. In quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing over 60 years of U.S. economic sanctions, Bryan Early reveals that both types of third-party sanctions busters have played a major role in undermining U.S. economic sanctions. Surprisingly, his analysis also reveals that the United States' closest allies are often its sanctions' worst enemies. The book offers the first comprehensive explanation for why different types of sanctions busting occur and reveals the devastating effects it has on economic sanctions' chances of success.

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For a generation of contemporary Anglo-American novelists, the question "Why write?" has been answered with a renewed will to believe in the ethical value of literature. Dissatisfied with postmodernist parody and pastiche, a broad array of novelist-critics—including J.M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison, Zadie Smith, Gish Jen, Ian McEwan, and Jonathan Franzen—champion the novel as the literary genre most qualified to illuminate individual ethical action and decision-making within complex and diverse social worlds. Key to this contemporary vision of the novel's ethical power is the task of knowing and being responsible to people different from oneself, and so thoroughly have contemporary novelists devoted themselves to the ethics of otherness, that this ethics frequently sets the terms for plot, characterization, and theme. In The Novel and the New Ethics, literary critic Dorothy J. Hale investigates how the contemporary emphasis on literature's social relevance sparks a new ethical description of the novel's social value that is in fact rooted in the modernist notion of narrative form. This "new" ethics of the contemporary moment has its origin in the "new" idea of novelistic form that Henry James inaugurated and which was consolidated through the modernist narrative experiments and was developed over the course of the twentieth century. In Hale's reading, the art of the novel becomes defined with increasing explicitness as an aesthetics of alterity made visible as a formalist ethics. In fact, it is this commitment to otherness as a narrative act which has conferred on the genre an artistic intensity and richness that extends to the novel's every word.

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